I want a linux/mac compatible terminal environment sandboxed in iPad OS. I don't need them to be the root OS or try to use a mouse-centric UI via a touchscreen.
Right. I actually do understand and accept the security argument for the locked-down nature of iOS. But with iSH already approved by Apple, WebAssembly already providing a sandboxed VM for untrusted native code, and Google offering VMs on their phones today, full support for untrusted VMs seems like a very reasonable request. If those VMs had graphics support, that might well make the difference between me purchasing an iPad Pro and not—for example, WSL2 is the reason why I've been on Windows lately.
I would guess that Apple fears that Epic will start using untrusted VMs to distribute Fortnite outside the App Store. Though, honestly, they're not far from being able to do that with a hypothetical WebAssembly/WebGL version already.
Sadly, it would probably be memory starved. There isn’t much RAM on those devices. When I tried UTM, a year or so ago, it was difficult to get a functional VM on an iPad Pro.
It makes me wonder how much life my 2018 iPad Pro has left. I think it only has 3GB of RAM, which I could see being more important, as Apple adds more multitasking to the OS.
> iPad OS 16 also adds virtual memory for the first time on an iOS device.
I have also seen that claim, but I have a really hard time believing they didn’t have swap before. Like hell, I’m sure they must have used memory compression as well..
As far as I know iOS dealt with memory by ruthlessly ejecting background apps from memory as needed. If your foreground app exceeded memory limits and all background apps had already been freed then your foreground app is killed.
The latter is pretty rare given how much work has been put into notifying apps about memory pressure, making them easily suspend/resume, and not using garbage collection.
Well, in a way it is a form of swap (just a program-controlled one over an automatic), to tell it to save its state because it is gonna be killed. And to be honest, it is a very fair way of working that should be moved to the desktop as well (plenty of apps have no reason to run in the background - though memory eviction is not needed there when ample memory is available).
Also, sorry to be pedantic but reference counting is a garbage collector algorithm, but I do understand what you mean here (RC needs less memory at the price of not being able to defer work to a concurrent thread)
Not necessarily. I'd be curious to see a slightly different take on the programming environments I'm used to. I like macOS more than iPadOS but regardless, right now I couldn't work on the iPad if I wanted to.
